Agreed. In that case it was the only solution. Heck, I think even Gary Mitchell thought so! Not the same deal with Nero of course.
Kirk's execution of Nero/Optimus Prime "Any Last Words?" TF2
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Agreed. In that case it was the only solution. Heck, I think even Gary Mitchell thought so! Not the same deal with Nero of course.
Kirk thought stranding Gary on Delta Vega was the right solution. Hell, years later he thougt stranding Khan in the Ceti Alpha system was the right solution. We know how that turned out. This Kirk seems to be a bit wiser.
Yeah but how long was a super being who could create anything by just thinking about it going to remain on DV? Never a good idea. Adds weight to the claim NuKirk is "wiser" I guess, but its a fine line between looking wiser and just being ruthless and vengeful.
As far as Khan goes, you are suggesting that if you can't be sure there won't be a one hundred billion to one accident to the planet and if Star Fleet can't be relied on to remember even the system (let alone planet) they put a dangerous criminal in, it is always better to just kill them on the off chance?
Khan should have been brought back to Earth to stand trial.Kirk thought stranding Gary on Delta Vega was the right solution. Hell, years later he thougt stranding Khan in the Ceti Alpha system was the right solution. We know how that turned out. This Kirk seems to be a bit wiser.
Yeah but how long was a super being who could create anything by just thinking about it going to remain on DV? Never a good idea. Adds weight to the claim NuKirk is "wiser" I guess, but its a fine line between looking wiser and just being ruthless and vengeful.
As far as Khan goes, you are suggesting that if you can't be sure there won't be a one hundred billion to one accident to the planet and if Star Fleet can't be relied on to remember even the system (let alone planet) they put a dangerous criminal in, it is always better to just kill them on the off chance?
I suppose that Nero should have too.
Though from a dramatic standpoint that solution is a bit "flat" and anti-climatic.
Agreed on all three.
This is the crux of the matter now isn't it? You didn't like the movie. That's fine.
But to imply that I know that Prime Kirk would never have done something like that and I am trying find some way to excuse NuKirk's behavior just because I like the movie is just not true.
I liked the movie and I actually had more problem with Spock's attitude in the situation.
But Nero belongs to a tradition of movie villains that all met their demise in a Star Trek Movie movie.
Khan: Killed
Kruge: Killed
Chang: Killed
Soran: Killed
Borg Queen: Killed
Ru'afo: Killed
Shinzon: Killed
Nero: Killed
We could could debate until the cows come home on whether or not prime Kirk would kill in this manner. I personally think he would if the situation called for it...but in all honesty this is one of my least problems with the movie and I do like the movie..it is my favorite Trek movie!
Sorry. I will of course take your word on that.
While I agree we can't be certain how an imagined Prime Kirk would always react, I am not uncomfortable drawing pretty strong conclusions from how he did react. As you have probably guessed, I think how he reacts is important to Trek. This is why I am interested in why you say:
I mean, Spock turned down the political rationale. Neither appears interested in humanitarianism, so isn't he more honourable in that sense than Kirk? In what negative way does he differ? You believe NuKirk had to do it, and if I agreed with you, I would have had no problem with Kirk's behaviour either, but his exchange with Spock and other factors mentioned in my previous post seem to argue against that justification, don't they?
Bingo. There probably should've been a line to that effect, but, then, there's a lot of dialogue I would've liked to polish up in Trek XI. Hopefully, that was a writer's strike thing, and XII will be have more natural-sounding jargon and fewer odd omissions and implicit explanations so we can avoid future discussions of this type. "nuKirk is such a monster! He fired on a ship that refused to surrender and whose captain demanded a fight to the death, when there was only a fifty-fifty chance it would end up in the past and go on to butcher even more innocent people! I mean, why couldn't Kirk just let him go in peace? He only destroyed dozens of Federation and Klingon starships and obliterated the Vulcan people, he's obviously a trustworthy crazy man with a super-powerful death-ship."
As I think about this further I do have problems with Kirks behavior too. He wanted to save Nero, Spock didn't and Kirk gives into him rather quickly.
I think it would have been better had Nero died when the Jellyfish rammed the Narada.
Off topic but did you have a problem when Picard didn't have Riker beam both himself and Ru'afo off the exploding particle collector? I did.
NuKirk endangered the ship for no good reason. Nero was Done, no matter how insane or merely stupid he was - HIS ship was being wadded like tinfoil by the forces of the black hole. No reason to even hang around once he refused rescue, much less stay there to shoot him up, wasting power and depriving the Enterprise of much-needed escape time.
he had to ensure that Nero wasn't going to escape. In the pseudoscience backdrop of Star Trek XI there were all kinds of possibilities.
Because, right from the beginning, the Vulcans have always been a pretty ruthless bunch. Consider:
As pointed out earlier, Spock was urging Kirk to kill Gary Mitchell as early as the second pilot.
Amok Time: In the first major "Vulcan" episode, T'Pring plots to have either Kirk or Spock killed so she can be with Stonn. And even the sainted T'Pau forces Kirk and Spock to battle to the death for the sake of tradition, even when it's obvious that Kirk had no idea what he had just agreed to.
Journey to Babel: Spock admits that his father, Sarek, is perfectly capable of killing in cold blood--if he has a logical reason to do so.
In other words, pretty much every time TOS did a "Vulcan" episode, they made it clear that the Vulcans could be dangerous if crossed . . . . like maybe if you destroyed their entire planet?
To be honest, it often seems like people who have issues with the new movie have selective memories (and rose-colored glasses) when it comes to what TOS was really about. Or maybe they grew up on TNG instead . . . which was much more heavily invested in the idea that Trek was supposed to be some sort of visionary blueprint for the future. As opposed to TOS which was more of a rough-and-tumble space opera filled with flawed, volatile characters who weren't always paragons of Starfleet virtue.
Just like in the new movie.
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Very good points! So often Vulcans get portrayed as these Peace loving pacifists yet they were not always that way.
Plus...did any one really expect that Nero would be alive at the end of the movie?
Well as far as I know I'm not really a fan of the film, at all, and I agree with the actions Kirk took. Whether he did the right thing for the wrong reasons or not... it was still the right thing to do.
You have to remember that the Kirk that gave the order to open fire on Nero is Jim Kirk seven years before we're introduced to him in the Prime timeline. Plus you have to remember that he is staring down an individual that was responsible for the death of his father and responsible for the deaths of six billion plus other beings, I was surprised he even made the token offer. Prime universe Jim Kirk was never faced with such a scenario, so saying that his reaction would be different is just speculation on your part.
Not to mention all those Starfleet ships, crews, and cadets that were killed in the initial assault on Vulcan--including, probably, the green-skinned girl.
Under the circumstances, I think Kirk is to be applauded for offering Nero a chance to surrender peacefully. Most people, now or in the 23rd century, would not show that much restraint when it came to someone who killed their father, umpteen Starfleet officers, and an entire planet. And whom had tortured Christopher Pike--and almost just destroyed Earth.
I can't imagine Prime Kirk would have reacted much differently under the circumstances. He offered Khan a chance to surrender, too . . . .
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Only in Trek III, Kirk had to kick off Kruge, or he was going to die; Nero was no longer a threat. I wish the writers had just added a line, right after Nero said, "I would rather die that accept help from you.", where Chekov yelled something like, "Keptin - the Narada has locked onto us with a tractor beam, and is pulling us into the singularity with her!". At which point Kirk could say, "Fine. Mr. Sulu, fire everything we've got.". Now, that would have been like the Kruge situation, and would have justified Kirk's actions more to the audience - one extra line was all that was needed!
No it really wasn't. Kirk got told to "fuck off", so he finished off Nero so he didn't become some other timelines "pain in the ass". Nero was a mass-murderer on an unprecedented scale, I'm not sure why you're on about Kirk passing sentence on him.
I'm not sure I would have made the offer to help even. Nero would have had some type of warped cult grow up around him and lived a cushy life in a Fed penal colony for his transgressions. Not a fair trade for killing six billion plus beings.
Huh? I wasn't talking about Kruge or The Search for Spock. I was talking about that bit in "Friday's Child" where Kirk, who has his back against the wall and expects to be killed soon, expresses a desire to take "the Klingon" with him--for revenge, if nothing else. (As I recall, the ship was in no danger at that point. It was just Kirk, Spock, and McCoy being hunted by noble warriors wearing Day-Glo fur boas.)
And the idea is not to "drag Prime Kirk down to NuKirk's level" (the very phrasing of which seems to imply that the Original Recipe is, by definition, superior to the modern version) but to point out, once again, the double standard (and selective amnesia) that often seems to plague these debates--in which NuTrek is not compared to original series and characters as they actually were, but to some idealized version that conveniently forgets how flawed, imperfect and oh-so-human Kirk and Spock and the others have always been (thank god!).
Or, as Carol Marcus put it much more succinctly: Jim Kirk was never a Boy Scout.
Yes, he did offer Khan a chance to surrender, because until Khan activated the Genesis device, the Reliant was totally defenseless, with no shields, weapons, or propulsion, and note that Prime Kirk did not then proceed to fire on the Reliant when Khan refused to communicate, and I don't think he would have at that point, even if the Genesis device wasn't aboard ... Kirk would not have fired at that point unless the reliant had made further aggressive action, which it couldn't, except to activate the Genesis Device, which Khan did... so I would say this is an example that Prime Kirk never "kicked a man when he's down", unless that individual or vessel continued to threaten his wellbeing.
